Do you ever question if your meditation practice is truly effective via signs?
Time can drag during meditation because it often feels like you’re just sitting there reviewing your to-do list or thinking about the meditation technique itself. You may not realize it, but you may be into a deep state of meditation. The transition into a profound meditation might be as subtle as going to sleep.
When you’re meditating, it’s better to avoid trying to figure out if you’re deep in the practice because you might ruin the experience. However, after you emerge from your meditation, you can determine whether you went deep by considering if you noticed any of these typical signs:
1. You perceive gaps in time.
If you found that more time was passing than you could account for, that’s a strong clue that you entered a deep state of meditation. Put another, you may have meditated for twenty minutes, but it felt more like ten, and during that ten minutes you don’t seem to have thought much at all.
2. You breathed shallowly.
One common side effect of the deep depths of rest attained during meditation is taking a big intake of breath. The rate at which the body breathes is correlated with how much rest it receives throughout a certain experience. You’ll be breathing quickly when you exercise.
Your respiratory rate decreases noticeably when you are reading a book while seated. Your breathing rate decreases even further when you are asleep. Additionally, you can breathe at even deeper levels during meditation than when you sleep, to the point where you are scarcely breathing at all.
It is possible for you to completely stop breathing during these intervals of deep sleep. Usually, you will then need to take a big breath to bring things back to normal and resume breathing normally.
Related Post: Daily Zen: 10 Tips for a Lasting Daily Meditation Routine
3. It escaped your grasp that you were meditating.
You were not really that deep into your meditation if all you could think about during your meditation was that you were meditating. A moderate to profound loss of awareness is implied by deep meditation, and this includes losing awareness of the fact that you are meditating.
This is when the exercise becomes a little tough. Those who have attempted to force themselves to fall asleep at night by complaining about their inability to fall asleep have typically found that this keeps them up later than intended.
Rather, experts suggest keeping your mind busy with other activities, such as reading, counting backwards, or seeing sheep. For this reason, certain meditation techniques have traditionally used breath awareness, yantras, or mantras to subtly entice the mind away from surface awareness and make it forget that you are even meditating.
4. You got consumed in your own thoughts.
When you delve deep, your awareness moves from the obvious to the subtle and finally to nothing. You will be considering a variety of things while your mind moves through the many states of consciousness, most of which will have nothing to do with meditation. You risk re-exciting your mind if you fight against your thoughts. As strange as it may seem, if you give in to the thoughts, your mind will keep de-exciting until you eventually lose awareness altogether, a sign of the most profound forms of meditation.
One More Note
Your meditation practice wasn’t ineffective even if you didn’t encounter any of these signs. Every meditation practitioner occasionally has experiences that seem more surface-level. Novices rate their surface experiences as “bad” and their inner experiences as “good” meditations; this is where novices and experienced meditators diverge.
However, because they have fewer expectations about what a meditation should feel like, seasoned practitioners are better able to enjoy longer, more profound meditations because they don’t pass judgment on their experiences.
![Signs That You've Meditated Deeply](https://i0.wp.com/jasminefeliciano.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Signs-That-Youve-Meditated-Deeply-pin.png?resize=683%2C1024&quality=80&ssl=1)
The secret is to approach every meditation experience with this attitude of indifference. Recognize that consistency is another important factor that affects how good your encounters are. During the first few days, weeks, or even months of your meditation practice, don’t expect significant changes. They will happen someday, but usually not when you expect them to.
Recall that every meditation has value and helps you achieve more effortless experiences in each subsequent meditation.
To Wrap Things Up
Understanding the subtleties of deep meditation can greatly enhance your practice. Don’t worry about gauging your depth during meditation; instead, reflect afterwards on signs like time gaps, shallow breathing, loss of awareness, and getting absorbed in thoughts.
Every session has value, and consistency is key to deeper experiences. Avoid judging your meditations as good or bad; embrace each session with an open mind. With patience and regular practice, profound meditation experiences will come naturally.
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